Saturday, October 9, 2010

Robbing three casinos at once

A few weeks ago I watched the movie Ocean's Eleven a few times and spent a whole night writing down the plot's entire plan as a work-graph in Freemind. The result was a not-so-big graph (around 170 vertices), but when you try to view it all in one screen you get this:

I chose this particular plan because it illustrates a few problems with current planning tools.Notice it's not such a big plan. 170 work-items, when each item measures in hours, is about two weeks' worth of work for a small team. Yet when you try to visualize it all in one screen you get a mess. Granted, Freemind isn't exactly designed to do this, and there are other tools that do a slightly better job at laying out graphs. But these tools don't allow you to write down and edit your plan as easily as mind-mapping tools like Freemind do.

The same plan in MS Project looks like this:

A bit less messy, but still: you can't really make out the text; the connecting lines overlap and you can't tell what depends on what; and if you zoom in you have to scroll the screen four times just to view the whole plan. And editing? Forget about it. Writing down the initial plan in Freemind took me 1-2 hours, but doing the same in MS Project was just impossible. I just couldn't do it.And what if the plan had 1700 steps, instead of 170? Both of these tools would have failed spectacularly.Now here's the same plan in Gigantt. Click any item to zoom into it, or use the mouse wheel. By zooming in on each level of the plan you maintain your 2D orientation and you're not lost in the details. What's missing? A lot. Obviously, it still doesn't show connecting lines between items. And of course it's read-only. But with time I'm going to add the ability to edit the graph as conveniently as you would a mind-map. But that's all in future showcases. Right now you can just have fun zooming around this skeleton of a Gigantt plan and hopefully be impressed by how difficult it is to rob three casinos at once.

Seems like a very worthy problem you are trying to solve. I myself hate every project planning tool I used , I found that MS-project is good for planning and difficult to maintain and that most of the web ones I used are just feature crippled and not responsive enough

lol, Ohad, this is just a mockup of one way to visualize graphs that I'm trying out. Finding missing features in this thing is not the point. All the issues you raise, and more, have been considered, don't worry. What you see here isn't 1% of the planned feature set.

Assaf, you asked us "would you have paid a monthly subscription to use such a service (assuming it was feature-complete of course)? If so, how much".

How can I answer this question if all details are missing? I understood of course that it's just a mockup, but how can I imagine what does "feature-complete" mean in your own mind? (certainly can't say how much I would pay for something that I have to imagine myself like the product look and features you still keep in your own mind...)